This got me thinking today as there was this viral video of what appears to be a Taiwan tourist visiting in Japan in a busy pedestrian area called Shibuya crossing and it seems like the child stops and poses for the camera as in the background you can see this lady with a mask start to intentionally push people and eventually the child. This in itself sparked outrage of course but the topic then became a detective mystery on what nationality the women was. It seemed like a lot of people were at first labelling the lady as Chinese only for then others to say the person clearly looked Japanese. The reason people were saying how people wanted the lady to be Chinese is because people locally refuse to believe it’s one of their own that would do this and Japan is suppose to have a reputation of being nice.
While this should just be a topic of how terrible the women was in general, it brought up the topic where many times people will jump to defend their own as they feel it would in-turn make them look bad too and so one needs to parentally downplay or deflect the incident. Example, regardless of the person’s nationality both sides should be condemning her. It reminds me many times in business too when people see their colleague doing something bad they immediately try and defend it because people will start associating the whole company in a negative way and they don’t want that.
It’s a strange approach as just condemning the person kind of accomplishes everything safely. You tell people you clearly don’t agree with those types of behaviours and everyone will treat it as a incident specific to that individual versus everyone that is associated with them. Does it not make more sense?